David Emery Online

Adapt or Die

25 October 2006

Jason Calacanis, he of Weblogs Inc and Netscape fame, has just posted about how feed readers shouldn’t show adverts next to full text feeds. Essentially, the thrust of his argument is that websites – online feed readers such as Bloglines included – shouldn’t be allowed to make money off of their content.

I haven’t seem someone so well known and so respected say something this stupid in a long time.

For a start, the argument is full of holes; does this extend to desktop feed readers showing ads? What about if you browse to their site using a browser that shows ads? Is that “unfair” as well? How about all those feed readers that cost money? They’re benefiting from your feeds – if someone uses NetNewsWire which costs $29.99 and subscribes to your full text feed, should you get a cut of that $29.99?

Of course not.

This whole concept is quite absurd – if you don’t want people using those feeds, don’t put them out there. Once you’ve made the decision that you see a benefit in distributing your content in this way, you can’t start to try and artificially limit how people use it; it just won’t work. If your business model can’t cope with that, then you have to adapt.

It’s that simple.

Sooner or later – we might have to wait till this bubble bursts for it to happen – every feed reader is going to have to get a business model. For web feed readers such as Bloglines, Newsgator and Google Reader this means advertising ( Feedlounge has shown that a subscription model doesn’t work). Sure, in the mean time we’re going to experience a huge uptake in desktop readers due to Firefox 2 and IE 7’s support, but there’s still going to be a large (and growing) market using the web readers.

The whole thing reminds me very much of the major labels stance on digital music – it fundamentally screws up their business model, so they’re desperately trying to stop people from doing it (using draconian DRM, suing people etc). The sooner they realise that they need to adapt as opposed to fighting it the sooner they can start really profiting.

The sooner web based feed readers starting making a proper income they can add features to increase their users, increasing the people that can easily read your content which means more potential revenue for you! Trying to take away from their income is quite simply greedy – and in the long run, a very bad move.